Deadly Slipper (34 page)

Mara shook her head. “Jeanne de Sauvignac is tougher than she looks, believe me. And Julian?” She thought tardily of the man she had so recently denounced. “I take it Henri’s confession clears Julian?”

“Ah,” said the
commissaire.
Something in his voice caused Mara to sit up.

“That one’s not so simple,” pronounced Loulou, pulling up a chair and plumping his fat bottom onto it. His expression was bland, but his complexion had gone pink with suppressed excitement. “De Sauvignac’s confession clears Julian of involvement with Mademoiselle Beatrice, certainly. But there’s still the little matter of Julie Ménard.”

“But surely Henri—”

Loulou wagged a finger back and forth. “Nothing sure about it. De Sauvignac claims to have no knowledge of any of the other missing women. And we have no evidence linking him to them.”

“What have you said to Monsieur Wood about your suspicions?” asked Boutot.

“Well, very little,” replied Mara uncomfortably. “I mean, it’s not the kind of thing one wants to talk about.”

“Just as well,” chuckled Loulou. “Because there’s more. Tell her, Antoine.”

Boutot sighed and blinked lugubriously at Mara. “One of my men just took a statement from a neighbor of the late Madame Charlebois. It seems that this person remembers a gardener who used to work for the old woman. She thinks it might have been around the time Mariette disappeared, and she had the impression that he only came a few times and then stopped. Described him as a foreign chap, English, she thought. Her description of this man fits Monsieur Wood almost exactly.”

“Julian?” Mara murmured, all her old doubts reviving.

“But the final straw”—Loulou jumped up, no longer able to contain himself—“is that another woman’s gone missing!”

Mara gaped at him.

“Arlette Cousty,” Boutot informed her. “Legal secretary, forty-five years old, married, no children, resident of Toulouse. Her husband reported her missing last week. She hasn’t been seen or heard of since. Her car was gone, some of her clothes as well. The husband admits to their having marital difficulties but believes that even if she had left him something must
have happened to her subsequently because she would not have failed to contact him. She was a very responsible type, you see.”

Mara shook her head. “But Toulouse is in the south. It’s a hundred and fifty kilometers away. How can this tie in?”

“Hear me out. The interesting thing is that Madame Cousty’s credit card was used to purchase gas on the evening of the day she went missing. Can you guess, Mara, where this purchase was made?”

Beynac, Carennac, Souillac, La Bique. The place names came back to Mara.

“Somewhere along the D703 or D25?” she hazarded.

“Exactly. At a station just outside of Beaumont. Shortly after seven on the evening in question, somebody purchased thirty-seven liters of gas at a Total station. Unfortunately, the cashier was one of these young cretins with earphones plugged into his head. Couldn’t recognize his own nose, let alone identify a photograph of Madame Cousty as the bearer of the card. Nevertheless, you see what this signifies, don’t you? Beaumont puts Arlette Cousty’s last known location right within our zone of interest!”

Mara stared first at one man and then the other. “What’s being done about it?” she asked at last.

Boutot fingered his pencil. “It’s being treated it as a case of domiciliary abandonment. So far.”

“Ha!” barked Loulou. “But you realize what all this means for Julian? He already has some explaining to
do regarding Julie Ménard. Now, supposing he’s identified as the man who worked for Madame Charlebois, and if he just happened to be cruising the area around Beaumont on the night in question, I’d say
he’s still very much in the frame!”

Mara wrote to Patsy.

Mara glanced out the window at trees, a blue sky, and sunshine. There seemed nothing more to say. She signed off, got up, and wandered restlessly about her studio. The unfinished plans for a kitchen renovation (another of Prudence’s referrals) lay on her workbench. In a corner stood a recently acquired nineteenth-century cheval glass mounted in a beautifully carved walnut frame. She had bought it quite reasonably from a
brocante
in Monpazier with another client in mind. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted to part with it. She stood before it, staring at her slightly tarnished reflection. Her eyes met those in the mirror. My face, she thought sadly. Bedie’s face. Hesitantly, she reached out to trace the contours of her image with a fingertip that met only the flat, cold hardness of glass.

My god!
she whispered as the realization hit her.

Rushing back to the computer, she logged on again.

A shadow fell into the room.

“Hello.” Julian stood in the open doorway.

“Oh,” said Mara and sat very still.

Jazz, who had been snoring on the floor, gave a grunt, heaved himself up, and ambled over to greet their visitor. Julian scratched the dog’s ear. He did not come farther into the studio but spoke from where he stood.

“We have unfinished business, Mara.”

“What—what do you mean?” She snapped her fingers for Jazz to return to her side. The dog ignored her.

“The
Cypripedium.”
Julian seemed exasperated at having to spell it out. “I mean, you’ve got what you—that is …” He trailed off awkwardly.

“I’ve found my sister but you still haven’t found your orchid. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that. But we did have a deal.”

“So?”

He looked a little surprised at her ungraciousness. “Look, I’m not asking you to hike the forest with me. Unless, of course, you want to. But I need your help.”

“How do you mean?”

“Jeanne de Sauvignac and her late father-in-law tried to establish a plantation of
Cypripedium calceolus
at Les Colombes. I think the mystery Lady’s Slipper was a mutant of this attempt. There’s a slim chance that it continued to propagate. I have to find this plantation. Jeanne is the only person who can tell me where it is. I understand she’s pretty incoherent right now, but time is running out fast. I mean, the
flowering season, and without a flower, I haven’t a prayer of proving my theory. I thought if you could ask Alain to get some sense of the location from his mother, even generally, it would narrow down my search tremendously. I happen to know that Géraud is also on the hunt, and I’m damned if I’m going to let that
voyou
beat me out again.”

She nodded. Julian had told her of Géraud’s scoop at the Société Jeannette meeting.

“All right,” she said. “I think I can do that for you.”

•

“Of course you realize it’s risky?” Loulou warned when Mara called him later.

“I do, but I think it’s the only way. Certainly you can see how what I’ve just told you puts things in a different light? It could be one of them, or both.”

“Hmm,” said the ex-cop. “I’ll talk with Boutot. He might just agree that your idea has some interesting possibilities.”

•

“Are you sure?” Julian adjusted his glasses and scratched his head.

They stood in the forecourt of Les Colombes, peering at a hand-drawn map held by Alain. It was the second time Julian had spoken with the son, and he liked him no better, even though the man had obviously gone to some trouble to get the information Julian needed.

“It’s the best Maman could do, I’m afraid,” said Alain. “She’s in a state of shock, and her memory
never was very good at the best of times. I could ask her again, if you think it would help.”

Julian considered this.

Mara, dressed in a baggy sweatshirt despite the warm day, said, “We may as well check the spot out first. If we don’t turn up anything, maybe you could talk to her again, Alain.”

He nodded. “Yes. That would be better. She’s still in a pretty bad way at the moment. I hadn’t realized how dependent she’s become on my father over the years. She’s frantic with anxiety. Binette and I had to restrain her physically from trying to go to Papa last evening. Speaking of which, I’d better return to the house. We’re sitting with her in turns, and Binette needs to get back to her cheesemaking.”

He left them.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Julian grumbled as they walked down the road leading away from the château.

“Why not?” asked Mara. This time she had left Jazz at home.

“Well,” he scowled at the map. “This puts it in low, wet land, under pine-forest cover. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a lot of bracken, which suggests acid soil, and”—he struggled to recall his first meeting with Henri de Sauvignac—“a big pond nearby. Lady’s Slippers like semi-shade and drier, alkaline soil.” Julian directed them onto a path snaking down in the direction of the valley he had crossed the day he fell into the
edze.
“If Jeanne and her father-in-law knew anything about orchids, and we have to assume
they did, they’d never have tried to establish the rootstock there.”

“Watch where you’re going,” warned Mara, scrambling after him down the steep slope. “You don’t want to fall into another pit.”

They descended to the valley floor. It was hot and windless there. The woods at noon were very quiet.

“This should be the spot,” said Julian after another twenty minutes or so. Deciduous trees had given way to conifers and ferns. “Really,” he muttered after a few minutes of pacing the ground, “this is damned odd. You don’t suppose she’d purposely try to mislead us, do you?”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because, from the sound of it, she’s round the twist.” He stopped and turned back to Mara. “Or because there’s something she doesn’t want us to find. Quite honestly, I don’t know about you, but I never really bought Henri de Sauvignac’s confession.” He shook his head. “It’s too convenient, somehow. Almost as if—as if he were protecting someone.”

Mara looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you said it was Jeanne who met your sister in the woods. I asked you before if you thought it could have been her and not Henri who attacked Bedie. She sounds crazy enough to have done it, you know. What if she has a sick need to find substitutes for her dead child? Or maybe she’s driven to punish young women because of the maid who let her little boy drown.”

It was a troubling hypothesis that called forth some of Mara’s own doubts about Jeanne de Sauvignac. She remembered the woman’s surprising strength, and the thought crossed her mind once again that behind Jeanne’s goggling appearance there was a purposeful intelligence, albeit functioning fitfully, like a faulty switch.

“Are you saying she’s setting us up for something?”

“Who knows,” muttered Julian. He resumed his pacing. “Anyway, I don’t see anything here that faintly resembles an orchid. Dammit, the habitat’s all wrong. Still, I suppose we ought to make a thorough search.” He sought a landmark and selected a tall pine tree standing in a small clearing. “We’ll take this as our point of reference. You remember how we squared off the ground when we were looking for the
Neottia?
Well, this time we’ll do it a little differently, and we’ll have to cut it finer. We’re no longer looking for an extensive colony of plants but possibly a single plant. You know what it looks like—dark-pink slipper, two long, spiraled petals springing out from the sides, blackish-purple sepals, fifty to sixty centimeters high. In case it’s past its flowering, keep your eye out for anything with three to five broad oval leaves, deeply veined, coming out of a single stem.”

He indicated two imaginary lines extending due east and west of the pine. “These will be our guide lines. We’ll start out back to back at the tree. I’ll go north twenty paces, you go south the same amount.
Be sure to look to either side of you as you go. When you’ve done your twenty, go five to your right, then right again, and return twenty paces, which should bring you back to the pine but in your case five paces farther west along your guide line. I’ll be five paces farther east. Then we repeat the procedure, each time ending up five paces farther away from the pine. After four repetitions, we’ll have each walked a twenty-by-twenty square. If we haven’t found anything, we’ll meet back at the pine, set the guide lines running north and south, and pace to east and west. At the end, together we’ll have walked a forty-by-forty square. It’s slow going, but it’s the only way to handle the search in such heavily overgrown terrain. Are you with me?”

Mara said she was.

“Good,” said Julian. “And—er—Mara, if anything happens, remember I’ll never be very far away.”

She glanced uneasily at him. “What can happen?”

“Oh, if you should get lost or something,” he said casually.

Yes, she thought.
Or something.

They set off.